Mackie's Blog!

Thunder got here yesterday. He and his mom had a nice drive over and around the mountains to get here. The first thing we did was get him out of the trailer and let him stretch a little. Put him in the round pen and I watch Cindi work with her horse for a few min.

You, I, can learn a lot about a horse and an owner by watching them. I have seen Cindi and Thunder last year at a clinic that we put on over in the valley. I remember that Cindi had not had Thunder very long at that time and when we came to the riding portion of the clinic she chose not to ride but to watch. I thought, now there is a person who understands her limits and perhaps, the limits of her horse. I thought she was really using her head and did not care much about what people would think about her, and her horse, for not riding. You don’t see that often.

I learned that Thunder has had 5 other owners in the life that Cindi knows about, so my guess is Cindi, has inherited some of the problems that Thunder may have. Bottom line is, it don’t matter. My job is to do the best I can to help them both.

Thunder’s mom is going to be coming over to work with Thunder and me on a regular basis so I am very excited about that. It will be a lot of fun to teach his mom how to be a good leader and give Thunder what he needs. What does he need you ask?

All horses need, food, water and from time to time medical attention and shoes if he's wearing them. But if he is left on his own, he will find food and water, most of the time, in the wild at least. Probably not in down town New York City, but he will figure it out other wise. Medical attention horses have done without for thousands of years and the same with shoes, but the thing he needs to survive is a herd. And he will find that in the wild on his own in time. So these, THINGS, humans can and have for the most part, taken care of, even the herd. But because we are humans, predators, we don’t understand what it’s like to live in a herd. What happens is we try to impose, project a predator’s mentality onto horses. By that I mean we try to treat them like we would treat other predators, dogs, cats, critters like that. We do that cause we have never been in a herd and don’t really understand the concept ourselves. But when we start to treat horses like dogs or cats, we start to have problems and so do our horses.

We need to understand how a herd works and why it works that way. We need to understand that, it don’t matter if we like it or not, herd thinking, we are not going to change it. And if we really want to give our horses what they need we need to give them that. A herd, even if that herd consist of only two, you and the horse. Cause if we don’t our horse is not going to get along well. They will be unsure, frightened, insecure and we, most of the time, not the horse, are the ones that will get hurt. So how do I created a herd for my horse?